On Tue, 31 Jul 2001 georgemw@speakeasy.net wrote:
If it's a crime to take actions specifically for the purpose of later rendering you unable to comply with a judge's order (is it?), how is escrowing it on the isle of man any different?
Oddly, I've been watching this one with some interest. The other day I got worried about potential disk drive crashes, since with one thing and another I'm starting to accumulate a lot of unreleased original source code on my main machine. After the work I've put into it, I'd hate to lose it. But it's not an application that does anything useful yet. It would be handy, from my point of view, to use usenet as an "offsite backup" solution -- posting encrypted source for work-in-progress on binary newsgroups so I could just go back and nab it out of the archives if I ever have a disk crash or in case the computer gets stolen. If I want to increase the odds of its getting archived, I would just embed it in a sound file or a movie file using stego (original sound and movies, so as to avoid DMCA hassles, of course). Stegograms present an interesting copyright question for the legally inclined; if I'm using usenet archives as offsite backup via stegograms, I'm okay with the release and public use of the stegogram, which most folks will interpret as being the same as the covertext. But would that entangle the copyright on the stegotext as well? Or if somebody took the stegogram and figured it out, would I have legal recourse to stop them from doing anything with my code? (I was considering going to a lawyer with this one, but since the odds against anyone hacking the password on the encrypted data in the stegotext are literally astronomical, I figure the point is sufficiently moot to be not worth answering except as an intellectual curiosity.) Bear